Hard drive spindown

From: Tom *** (me_at_privacy.net)
Date: 07/18/04 

Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 01:37:28 +0000

I am trying to get my laptop (Dell Inspiron 4100) to spin down its
hard drive when the machine is not being used, like it can do in
Windows. I realise that the HDParm -S command can do this, but
currently there is too much disk access going on to make this much
use. I have already discussed this problem in another newsgroup
(apologies to anyone who reads both), from which the most useful
suggestion was to disable syslog and use metalog instead, which
improved things a lot. However, even when I have neither syslog
nor metalog running, there is still some disk activity happening
about every 4-5 minutes which I cannot track down.

So far I have tried the following:
- switching from ext3 to ext2, in case its something to do with
the journalling filesystem
- mounting my ext2/3 partitions with the the noatime and
nodiratime options
- disabling crond and atd (not that I ever used them anyway)
- turning on the "laptop-mode" patch (by putting a "1" in
/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode)

None of the above appeared to make any noticeable difference. I
was also recommended to try a program called "noflushd", but I
couldn't get it to work, getting the error "Could not determine
PID of kupdate." I do not know what this means or what I can do
about it.

If anyone can think of anything else I could try then I would be
very grateful - thanks in advance.

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